KMMMU: Evaluation of Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding in Korean Language and Context

Nahyun Lee, Guijin Son, Hyunwoo Ko, Chanyoung Kim, JunYoung An, Kyubeen Han, Youngjae Yu, Il-Youp Kwak


Abstract
Multimodal evaluation is strengthened when benchmarks reflect the languages, institutions, and disciplinary conventions that shape expert visual reasoning. We introduce KMMMU, a native Korean benchmark built from Korean-native examination materials. KMMMU contains 3,466 questions spanning nine disciplines and nine visual modality categories. For targeted evaluation on challenging questions and Korean-specific knowledge, we additionally provide KMMMU-Adv and KMMMU-Local, respectively. Experiments show that the strongest evaluated open-weight model reaches 42.05% on the KMMMU, while the best evaluated proprietary model achieves 52.42% on the KMMMU-Adv. Performance varies substantially across disciplines and answer formats, with Korean-specific questions showing gaps of up to 13.43%. Error analysis suggests that inspected failures often involve convention-to-label mapping, few-shot symbolic induction, localized knowledge recall, and domain-specific standards, not reasoning depth alone. KMMMU provides a testbed for native Korean expert-level multimodal understanding beyond English-centric or translation-based evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2026.mrl-1.47
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2026)
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Jesujoba Alabi, Catherine Arnett, Tyler Chang, C.M. Downey, Omer Goldman, Senyu Li, Lester James Validad Miranda, Jirui Qi, David Stap, Genta Indra Winata, Xinyu Crystina Zhang
Venues:
MRL | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
609–634
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mrl-1.47/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nahyun Lee, Guijin Son, Hyunwoo Ko, Chanyoung Kim, JunYoung An, Kyubeen Han, Youngjae Yu, and Il-Youp Kwak. 2026. KMMMU: Evaluation of Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding in Korean Language and Context. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2026), pages 609–634, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KMMMU: Evaluation of Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding in Korean Language and Context (Lee et al., MRL 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.mrl-1.47.pdf